Beautiful Festa
We had our first party here in Portugal this weekend...right after disaster struck
Sunday, the day of our first barbecue here in Belas (a name that means “beautiful”), started off gray and cool and cloudy, with a threat of rain that never fell. We woke early, wanting to get to the store right when it opened. I took dishes over to the quinta where the dishwasher resides, and fed the eastern flock - for the second time finding several roosters on the wrong side of the brand new garden gates. It’s kind of hilarious, the three of them with their fancy tails standing at the gate looking embarrassed, like men who stayed out carousing into the early hours and now they are caught coming back to the hotel in last night’s clothes, having to ask the lady at the front desk for a key. I held the gate open for them and they wouldn’t look at me as they hurriedly filed out one by one.
I carried a load of clean dishes back to the palaceta, then fed the northern flock which was suffering a recent loss. I noticed on Saturday morning that Goldie Hawn was missing from the morning feeding, so took a stroll in the Secret Garden with the h to look for her and what eggs we might find - generally, one to three each day.
I saw her right away, near the wall - three or four roosters stood around, which is not atypical. I’ve seen another hen, Rosie the Riveter, under the same bush, a phalanx of courtiers hanging about. I thought she was just snugged into the chips - the flock has been doing a lot of lounging lately, since we spread most of the Secret Garden with the wood chips that were once rotting trees and dead or overhanging limbs. I ducked under a branch to get closer and saw immediately that Goldie was not resting, but dead.
I cried; the h gave me a hug. I brought a shovel and gloves and a bag from the house. Alberto pulled his car into the driveway and, seeing us over the wall, came over to ask if we needed anything for the party, and to give us a bag of gooseberries. A galinha morreau, I told him. We were unable to figure out what caused her death - it seems to me she had a broken neck - but what broke her neck? There was no use speculating.
Bury her in the orchard, Alberto suggested, so we did, covering her with a large bouquet of mallow flowers and then marking the spot with a flowered tile. She was a shy little hen and a prolific layer, a frequent companion of Alphonse, sometimes following him into the house to share a secret handful of peanuts.
After making sure the rest of the hens were accounted for, I headed up to the apple orchard, where Stanley and Stella have a peep of seven chicks. Had, I should say. I saw Stanley right away, but not Stella, which was unusual. If it’s feeding time, she always hustles over to me, her babies tumbling at her feet. If it’s not feeding time, she’d lead the chicks deeper into the pink and purple wildflowers we’ve allowed to proliferate - they are too pretty to cut down and provide nice shade for the baby chicks.
Mama, I called. I stopped and listened; was that cheeping? It was. I found two baby chicks huddled against the side of the wall, but no mama in sight. I heard more shrill emergency cheeping and peered over the wall to the road below - a baby was down there crying and jumping, trying to get back up the five foot wall. The hen and roosters of the eastern flock sauntered down the road, and the baby ran away in fright, pinballing between sets of rooster legs. I vaulted over the wall and scooped it up, running back to the palaceta to deposit it into the makeshift brooder - Princess Leia was already up and spends the day walking around the house, so no introductions needed to be made.
Then I returned to the orchard and found the two remaining chicks at the plastic water dispenser. I captured one, but the other - the smallest of the peep, and the only blonde - ran away and hid amongst the wildflowers.
Poor Stanley didn’t know what to do. He lowered his head and ruffled his neck at me, but I kept trying to capture the chick. Finally the h came to get me. We have to go now, he said. What are you doing?
I showed him the little chick, huddled and tiny in the palm of my gloved hand. There’s been a disaster, I told him. I can’t find mama! There are only three babies left.
While I put the second baby in the brooder, the h searched around for the mama or her remains, but there was nothing - not even a feather. What could have happened?
Our shopping trip was subdued. We clicked the items off our list one by one, discussing whatever needed to be discussed - how many kilos of shrimp? Sagres or Super Bock? Two packages of presunto or three? Do we need more olives, did you find the bamboo skewers? But the disaster of the hen and her babies - hens, counting Goldie - weighed heavily.
Back home we unloaded and prepared for the party. Tim and Kirsten shelled the shrimp and took on whatever job I asked, and when I cried over Stella and her babies, Kirsten wordlessly hugged me.
Things were busy for a couple of hours, there was a lot of running back and forth between the palaceta and the quinta fetching the garlic press for the marinade, the lemon juicer to make lemonade, the big platter for a cheese plate. Each time I made the trip, I would see Stanley with the lone yellow chick. On one pass I saw them both sitting in a shaft of sunlight, eyes closed, legs sticking out to the side. On other passes the chick would be standing almost under the rooster. It may be me anthropomorphizing, but Stanley looked determined to take care of the remaining chick. Still - Stanley isn’t a hen, and chicks less than a week old can’t survive long without the heat of their mama. No matter how dedicated Stanley was in his job as a protector, I doubted he’d sit on the chick like a hen would. But with our guests arriving shortly and bean salad to make and potatoes to roast and shrimp to marinade, there was no time to think about it. Every time I went to the palaceta I ran over to the brooder to check on the two little chicks, who stayed huddled under their warmer, traumatized.
I was just setting out plates and chips and olives when the h said, I caught the last little chick, he’s in the warmer now. This lightened my mood a lot; it’s a shock, really, how attached you can get to these little puffballs of life, these fuzz-covered pingpong balls with dinosaur feet.
One of our guests, Ana, knows firsthand; last summer she watered our plants and fed our chickens for two weeks while we were back in the US. One day she brought her kids and they found a chick all alone in the long driveway. It has happened a few times - sometimes a hen would hatch a peep near the foot of the driveway, then make the long journey to the top of the driveway where a decades-old water leak has kept the flock in fresh water. Often, the smallest of the peep would get stuck, or lost on the journey, requiring me or the h to pluck it up and deposit it with the rest of the peep. Sometimes the mama would peck at us, as if to say Doing what’s right doesn’t get you special credit, back off from my babies now.
The baby Ana and her kids found was alone, no mama or other babies in sight, so they took her home. We slept with her to keep her warm, Ana said. But it wasn’t enough, it died after three days. She said her kids cried for days, and still talk about it.
The party was fine. It was nothing major, just a little lunch in the quinta courtyard, celebrating the good weather and the improvements to the property and new friends. Kristen and Tim were the only Americans at the party (besides us) - everyone else was Portuguese, with a few Venezuelans and one Lebanese, all people we’ve met as neighbors, people we’ve worked with, and in one case, our AirBnB hosts when we first came to Belas. Adding to the congeniality were five kids, all middle school aged or younger, and three dogs. Alberto couldn’t make it, needing to attend to Rosa, who is convalescing, but he made a late showing laden with gifts: another huge bag of lemons, two bottles of wine, and a nail puzzle - two nails twisted together that look easy to pull apart but are not. I fiddled with it for fifteen minutes and gave up - I have no patience for such things. The h fiddled for about a minute and handed me the two nails, separated. I acted casual when handed them to Alberto and he looked impressed, until I laughed and admitted it was the h.
Alberto immediately produced a tool and bent over a rock, adjusting the angle of the bend in the nails to make it more difficult. I don’t have the Portuguese to tell him about the h’s collection of intricate Japanese metal puzzles ranked in difficulty from 1 to 6; most of his collection is ranked 6 and he has solved them all. There are few puzzles the h cannot solve, including a Rubik’s cube, including me.
The Venezuelans were Raffa, a programmer colleague of the h’s, with his fiance and sister. We love your hair, they said, which made me immediately love them because I am shallow. A few years ago I decided to not just go grey, but dye the non-grey half of my hair grey, too, except I like silvery purple better than grey and sometimes (not often) I worry a bit that this along with my tattoo sleeve of watercolor flowers makes me look like the world’s oldest anime character.
I’m so glad to be invited, Raffa said. A backyard party with neighbors sharing food and talk - this is what life is about! I agree.
We used old furniture salvaged when we cleaned out the building that will someday be the h’s workshop, at the back of the campo. It was a little weird - the furniture is polished wood, meant for an indoor dining room, but it has a nice big surface to hold our pitchers of lemonade and food and looked sort of elegant under the leaf-filtered light of the medieval plane tree whose branches arc over the courtyard.
Before the party we washed every glass we owned, all of which have been salvaged from the property; we had 23 glasses for our 21 guests - a few still warm from the dishwasher, a small triumph.
Jake roamed around barking with excitement at all the people he knew; when a friend (another Ana) showed up with her two bloodhounds - one a matriarch but the other just a puppy - Jake showed an unusual interest. Normally Jake has nothing much to do with youngsters, but he humped Bacci every chance he got. Tried to, I should say - he failed miserably as Bacci’s long back is only about eight inches off the ground, so Jake mostly humped air. At one point he seemed to throw his back out; Bacci sauntered away and Jake shook himself all over as if to say, I don’t know what came over me.
The grilled shrimp on skewers and chorizo chunks on toothpicks turned out to be a good choice for a party. There were no leftovers - everything was eaten except a bowl’s worth of three bean salad and another of potatoes, which we had today for lunch. Our failure to send someone to run down the street to get the famous fofos of Belas for dessert turned out to be a blessing, aa almost every guest brought a dessert, so our mesa de sobremesas was as full and varied as the lunch itself: lemon meringue cake, pastel de nata, a caramelized flan-like cake, strawberries.
Princess Leia was an unexpected hit at the party. The h went to the palaceta to fetch her so she could peck around in the garden; she is not accustomed to being alone, spending most days pecking around the house with Jake nearby. She did not get much pecking in, the kids were too smitten with her (just like the h) to let her just go chickening about; they took turns holding her in carefully cupped hands, and Leia hopped confidently from forearm to forearm.
I recognized the way she was looking at hands and mouths and cheeping loudly. She’s hungry, I told the h. She missed eating lunch with Jake.
The h fetched some blueberries, which must be cut into eighths for her little beak. He showed the kids how to click to get her attention, and everyone laughed at the way she zoomed to his hand and leapt and grabbed the blueberry in one motion. After that, everyone needed a turn feeding her, and within fifteen minutes her belly was literally stuffed with blueberries. There’s gonna be a lot of blue poo tonight, I murmured to the h, and he put his arm around me.
The kids ran around the garden and found things to do that kids find to do - Ines, Tiago’s middle girl, hopscotched up and down the red stepping stone walkway her dad laid down in a channel of gravel that edges the lower quinta garden and I smiled to myself because when no one is looking that is exactly how I walk the perimeter of that garden - the stepping stones invite it. I took everyone over to the Secret Garden for the afternoon feeding of the northern flock. Kirsten led a game of futebol in the carport. Then Ines demonstrated how Jake would do tricks for little chunks of roasted potato placed on his paw - something she learned while spending afternoons with me at the palaceta.
It boggles my mind how fast kids pick things up. The first time I showed Ines the trick with Jake, she imitated my commands, which Jake understood just fine: see for sit, lea for leave it, oki for okay. But by the second visit, she had it down, and now was teaching the others with all the confidence of a professional dog trainer: “Sit” she commanded (whereupon Jake sat); then she pointed at the ground (whereupon Jake lay down); “Leave it” she told him (whereupon the potato was balanced on Jake’s chocolate, gray-dusted paw) ….then a pause a few seconds (whereupon Jake stared intently at the potato, drooling); then finally saying “Okay” (whereupon Jake gobbled the potato off his paw).
This is such a good way for the kids to learn English, Ana whispered. Everyone wanted a turn, and soon Jake’s head was swiveling amid a chorus of children’s voices giving conflicting commands. In true Jake fashion he didn’t mind, just wagged and ate a banquet of potatoes off his paw.
At one point Tiago’s two year old, whose t-shirt was emblazoned with NEW YORK, sobbed at the foot of the outdoor staircase. Did Jake scare her? I asked. He was barking more than usual, overjoyed that each new arrival was someone he knew.
No, said her older sister, a tall graceful young girl who radiates intelligence and the early signs of the cool intellectual beauty she will one day be. She wants to be with the other kids but she can’t. The kids thundered past on the quinta road, calling to each other and the little one cried harder, til her grandpa Paulo picked her up and wrestled her into laughter.
During all of this, Ana’s young son Joao cradled Princess Leia so that she went zooming everywhere the kids went. Oh my god he is crazy for everything Star Wars, Ana said. When you said her name is Princess Leia, that was it.
Well, she lost her mother, just like Princess Leia, I reasoned. A dark force destroyed her home and her entire family, and she is now alone in the universe but for us. And it was her own bravery and quick thinking that saved her, we just came along after, like Luke and Obi-wan, to help.
Don’t tell him that, Ana begged. He will fall in love even more.
Later that evening Princess Leia would not go to sleep. We put her in her box with the warmer hoping that she would either accept or ignore the three sleeping orphan chicks, but we should have known that any creature named Princess Leia would not take dramatic changes to her living situation lying down. She struggled against my hand as I put her under the warmer, attempting to dodge left, then right, then left. Normally I can block her exit from under the warmer for a minute or so, and she gives up, becoming drunk and sleepy with warmth.
Last night, however, she kept hopping on top of the warmer and cheeping forlornly. There’s someone in my bed, that cheep said. Don’t make me go in there.
I took her out and let her ride my right hand for a bit while I worked. Pretty soon she hopped up onto my shoulder and burrowed under my hair. Everytime I touched her she yelled NO in her chicken voice. DON”T WANT BED, that yell said.
Don’t be scared of them, I whispered to her. They lost their mama just like you. She snuggled into my neck and went to sleep. I let her stay for an hour and then put her to bed and she was too sleepy to resist and accepted her three new roommates on a trial basis.
It won’t be for long - the box is far too small for four chicks - it’s barely big enough for one. This morning I was relieved when I took the towel off the top of the box - it is midnight blue, like the night sky - and all four chicks zoomed out from under the heater to crowd into the food bowl. Princess Leia kept bending her neck to inspect the newcomers, but when she spotted me leaped onto the warmer and then flew out of the box under her own power, hooking her beak on the side of the box until she could get her feet under her. It’s definitely time for a new brooder; luckily, I have a plan.
After eating her morning blueberries she is now patrolling the perimeter of the living room, per her usual morning routine, stopping to climb the h’s leg like a ladder and sample the flan cake left over from yesterday’s party. Paulo’s wife made the cake, and all night during clean up and the quiet after I thought about her. Many but not all of the people at our party were bilingual; I wish I had asked one of them to sit with us so I could thank her properly for the cake, express my admiration for her skilled baking, and ask her a little about herself - did she grow up in this area, or like other neighbors arrive here from places like Madeira and Porto? I will simply have to step up my Portuguese so I can, on next meeting, chat with her and maybe also ask her for the recipe for her marvelous cake which the h, having eaten it for breakfast, has insisted I get. I look forward to baking canneles de Bordeaux for her and Tiago’s wife Catia - baking is an international language, a dialect of love and affection. If you don’t do it, you are missing out.
Walking over to the quinta to fetch things from the refrigerator, I was confronted with the unbearably sad sight of Stanley standing outside the garden shed, where Stella hatched her peep and spent the first few days of motherhood scratching around the garden. He did not crow or scratch, just stood silent and stolid, nothing left to protect. Later I saw him sitting on the wall overlooking in the grape arbor where the disaster struck. Of course he is the same size as always - a big handsome rooster with a black chest, wing feathers with a blue tint and a high-plumed emerald green tail - but he nevertheless seems diminished.
I wish I could tell him that three of his offspring still live, cheeping noisily and demanding food and water and to get out and scratch at the ground with the freedom they were used to. While I’d love to reunite them, these early summer nights are still chilly, and the chicks would not survive without long spells under the downy warmth of their mama. Already this morning it poured rain for a half hour, an event that would have probably killed some or all of the chicks without a mama to keep them warm. At this age, without her, they are doomed to perish. Even Princess Leia, who is about ten weeks now and looks like a gawky middle schooler on the cusp of teenagerhood, still needs the warmer, and is not above climbing into our collar to snuggle when she gets too chilly from walking around on the tile floor.
Monday after breakfast our guests from Alaska Tim and Kirsten left for a weeklong trip to Porto, taking their paragliders and promising to send video. The house is full of the sound of cheep-cheeping - loud and piercing until I lean over the top of the box to see the three chicks standing outside their warmer. When they see my big scary face looking in at them they quiet down, their cheeps small and fearful, their little beaks opening and closing.
They’ve only been motherless for one day and night, they will have some adjusting to do. At least there are three of them, able to keep each other company, whereas poor Princess Leia had only we huge, ungainly humans to imprint on. As a result she is completely fearless of people, and Jake, navigating the forests of legs with loud reminders that she is on the floor, and demanding to be included in any eating she observes. The sight of her standing on the edge of Jake’s bowl, darting her beak in and out to spear bits of blueberry and apple right next to his great gnashing mouth is unbelievably cute.
Watching the gentle way young Joao handled Princess Leia, I have a feeling this orphaned heroine will be re-homed sooner rather than later. Our neighbors have a nice backyard and plans for a coop, but they’ve been too busy establishing their garden and tiny backyard pond to prioritize it. And perhaps the sad memory of the death of the chick last year kept the project on the back burner. But Leia with her familiar name, her downy neck stretching to gaze in your eyes, the placid way she takes a seat on a wrist or arm to enjoy a bit of warmth and rest, has captured Joao’s heart as fully as ours. There is nothing like a new love to ease the awful pain of a lost one.
I know a little about that - Friday was the third anniversary of the death of my first husband. Grief is such a strange thing; I felt sadness like a distant storm on the horizon all last week, not realizing the anniversary of his death was the reason.
But on Friday, I woke up remembering. It’s been three years, I told the h. It’s a measure of the kind of man he is that he did not ask me, three years since what? He knew by the way I said it. We hugged and Jake came wagging up, wanting in on the love action that could maybe be parlayed to a treat or walk. Then Princess Leia started chirping and Alberto came hallooing up the walk laden with bamboo poles and wire to help the h build lattices for the tomatoes and cucumbers to climb. We continued with our day, neither of us saying the thing we always say to each other at times like this, probably because we were both thinking it: no matter how long our lives are they won’t feel long enough, so don’t stress the small stuff. Appreciate every moment; live big.